BLOCKHEADS: Like letters carved in rockSPLITHEADS: Like letters written in sandFOUNTAINHEADS: Like letters written in running water

Fountainheads are neither this nor that, but coming and going, like Bakhtin’s mode of linguistic homelessness (where no one ideal is grasped). Fountainheads do not retain their passing thoughts and their minds are always clear: the fluid self, freely moving, living energy, with mental alertness, inner strength, and mindfulness.

How is life related to the mind?
Is mind continuous with life?
How do we know what we know?
What’s love got to do with it?

Maturana & Varela (1987) address these questions in The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding: “We have only the world that we bring forth with others, and only love helps us bring it forth.”

“The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul” is a radical exploration of mind, brain, body, and soul in which editors Hofstadter & Dennett (1981) have arranged an enigmatic collection of provocative texts to problematize the nature of self.

In short, Dennett’s assignment is to undergo an advanced surgical procedure: the radical separation of his brain from his body…

Like it or not, Barbie is a popular culture icon and a powerful role model for girls. As Nora Lin, President of the Society of Women Engineers reports: “All the girls who imagine their futures through Barbie will learn that engineers — like girls — are free to explore infinite possibilities, limited only by their imagination. As a computer engineer, Barbie will show girls that women can turn their ideas into realities that have a direct and positive impact on people’s everyday lives in this exciting and rewarding career.”

Design Research & Innovation Lab for girls in grades 6 and 7. Learn how to: 1) build and program robotic pets; 2) design computer games, websites, and virtual worlds; 3) edit and animate ME Documentaries; and 4) be an educational co-researcher in a study with the How We Learn Lab at UBC.

Here are two thought provoking books addressing key concepts and curriculum issues in media education created by EDCP 481 peers, Faculty of Education, UBC (taught by Dr. Stephen Petrina). May you be inspired by the insights within each section and challenged to continue learning about media and technology.

What seems easier than to let a being be just the thing that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks? How do we get to a basic and primoridial understanding of being without making faulty interpretations? How do we know where the faulty interpretations lie (of which mine may be one) so we can correct them?

How do we have the right to say (when we couldn’t possibly know) that we’ve got THE most intelligible horizon of understanding, when, in a rich reality and complex world, there will always be the possibility of disclosing a more primordial intentionality and/or a broader universal horizon for being?

There was a child went forth every day. And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became… And these become of him or her that peruses them now (Walt Whitman, 1855)

Here are some troubling product advertisements to deconstruct. Note how they reflect the zeitgeist of the early 1900s and were not designed with irony or humor.

Times are changing in our technologically connected world and the way we think about games needs to change too. Games do much more than entertain us and research shows how games offer inherently engaging environments for learning complex real-world concepts that are difficult to teach, like sustainable development, citizenship, and global interdependence.

Here are some examples of Games For Change (G4C) that are freely available to play and learn from: Pos or Not, Food Force, Real Lives, Free Rice, Deliver the Net, ICED: I Can End Deportation, Activism NYC, Vinyl Game, Play the News, Darfur is Dying, World Without Oil, Ayati: The Cost of Life, A Planet Green Game, A Force More Powerful, 3rd World Farmer, and Becoming a World Hero.